Free programs are often the best alternative

Sunday

Jun 23, 2013 at 6:00 AMJun 23, 2013 at 7:18 AM

By Bob and Joy Schwabach, ON COMPUTERS

Joy's club was looking for someone to take over their online newsletter. And the person had to be an expert in QuarkXpress or Adobe's InDesign, they said. Why? Because that's what the last newsletter editor used!

This is a classic case of overkill. A newsletter is a simple thing to create and edit; there's even a template for it in Microsoft Word. So what the last editor did — or perhaps the editor before her — was use an $800 program (QuarkXpress) or $700 for the other one, to kill a fly.

OK, it wasn't a fly, it was a newsletter, but the point is simply it was big-time overkill. If you want or need a lot of features, a program like PagePlus, which just came out in a new version, sells for $99. It also does ebooks, traditional printed books, brochures, etc. There are at least half a dozen other programs, such as WordPerfect for Windows and MS Word itself, that do most of what any normal usage would require.

So what happened here at the club newsletter is actually very common. Take photo editing, for example. We talked to a clerk at one of those giant office supply stores. He had just sold a customer Adobe PhotoShop for $700, because the person wanted to edit some photos. Now there are a ton of programs that let you edit digital photos and quite a few are free. Picasa is a huge photo editing program, completely free. But the customer didn't want anything like that, he wanted the very best — no matter how much it cost!

Good luck, Joe. You buy the best because you can afford it, and you think that's the way to go. But the dollar cost of a big program is just the beginning. It takes weeks and sometimes months to learn how to use the tools of a major program. Almost certainly, only graphics professionals want all those tools.

We tried PagePlus for $99 and it was a snap. It even accepted the old newsletter created with the expensive programs and let Joy edit it as if it were new. PagePlus came with lots of onboard tutorials, but she didn't need to bother with any of them. The only thing we couldn't do, that we could do in Quark Express, was make smartphone apps. But that wasn't on our list of must-haves. There's a free trial of the PagePlus at Serif.com. The starter edition is free.

Undeleting Delete

If you use Gmail on your Android phone, you may be annoyed by the latest version. It deleted the "delete" icon. Here's how to get it back.

Tap the Gmail icon on your phone. Then tap the "menu" button. Tap "settings," and then "Archive and Delete." Tap "show Delete" or "show Archive and Delete." It's nice to show the "Archive" button, so we tapped that one. "Archive" lets you store old messages without deleting them.

Be In Pictures

AmazonStudios.com wants to hire you to write a movie. If they choose your script for development, you get $10,000. If it becomes a movie, you get $200,000. If it grosses $60 million at the U.S. box office, you get $400,000.

You can submit your movie script privately or publicly to get feedback, but if it makes it to the development stage, the community at large will weigh in on it and suggest improvements. That gives it a bigger chance of going to the "test movie" phase. If you're into directing, you can apply to be one of the test movie directors.

There are 26 projects now in development, with a movie trailer for each. Here's what's neat: Amazon Studios will create the movie trailer for you, complete with sound effects, props and characters. Some of the trailers use illustrations, others use cinematography. We took a look at what they had so far, and it was beyond boring. Maybe you can do it better. In fact, it's hard do see how you could do worse.

App Happy

Closed Capp lets you communicate with the deaf and hard of hearing using your smartphone. Instead of writing down the words, this 99 cent app takes spoken words and displays them on your phone screen. There are versions for Android and iPhone.

You can keep it on continuously, but a new feature lets you use it intermittently. Press the "voice recognition" button, speak into the phone, and see your words show up on the screen when you're ready to share.

Closed Capp worked great in our tests. The font is nice and large so your hearing-impaired friend doesn't have to put on reading glasses to view it.

Numbers Report

We thought the point of a mobile device is to move around with it, but according to a Nielsen study, when people watch TV and videos on their phones, they're usually at home. Netflix and Hulu are the most watched services.

Yahoo Is Looking

Yahoo mail recently started forcing users to upgrade to a new version, or stop using Yahoo. This came off as pushy and a little scary for some of our readers.

The supposed benefits are faster email, less spam, and an easier-to-use design. But not everybody is on board. The biggest complaint concerns Yahoo's new policy of scanning your email messages so they can target ads. Google's Gmail has done this since its beginning, and it doesn't bother us. It's just robots selecting the ads, and we'd rather see relevant than irrelevant ones.

Savvy folks point out that if you don't like your email being scanned, you should stop using your grocery savings card, which also tracks usage. And be wary of using a credit card, which provides huge amounts of information about you to the card company. An alternative to having your email scanned is to use Apple's free email service from iCloud.com.